


Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain

by busaikko



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Consent Issues, Dubious Consent, M/M, Non-Consensual, POV Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-07
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-22 17:23:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/915987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos was born perfect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain

**Author's Note:**

> Title from J. R. R. Tolkien - The Fellowship Of The Ring
> 
> Inspired by the Night Vale Community Kink prompt http://nightvalecommunitykink.dreamwidth.org/822.html?thread=121654#cmt121654

Carlos was born perfect.

That's what the attending midwife said, at any rate, as she handed him to his mother: "Perfect in every way." He continued to be superlative throughout his exemplary childhood, and his teeth grew in strong and straight, with no caries or gaps. His hair was glossy and thick and he wore it on the long side. His grades in school were at the top of the class.

He was accepted to every university he applied to, with full scholarships and his own laboratory for personal research. He didn't have to be a TA, but he willingly volunteered his time. All the undergraduates said his explanations were the best, sweeping away confusion and revealing the underlying beauties of science and the natural world.

Carlos had sex once every six months between age twenty and age twenty-five. He fucked, he was told on each occasion, magnificently. He always said the right thing, and his lips – it had been remarked – were like a heavenly orgasmic choir when unleashed upon the genitalia of the men and women he slept with.

He had been the subject of poems, songs, an opera, and a thesis, had posed for statues and portraits, and his university – bereft when he finally left to go conduct research for a faceless, nameless research conglomerate – named the koi pond in front of the library in his honor. He never confessed that his passions for seismology and physics were in fact secondary to his love for the unimpaired, blunt, _perfect_ honesty of the peer review process.

Because that would be weird.

But where Carlos walked, love welled in his wake. He could have anyone he wanted with a sweet smile and a delicately raised eyebrow. Strangers meeting him forgot their wedding or religious vows. Had his parents provided him with siblings, he was not sure consanguinity would be enough to deflect the adoration his perfection compelled. There were many reasons he now only communicated with his parents and grandparents through the ritual sharing of animal videos on Facebook, though he refused – on scientific principle – to examine his own motivations closely.

As he aged, he chose to want no one and nothing but the pursuit of truth.

He had to, because otherwise he could get away with murder. While he'd known for a while that his perfection was something monstrous, becoming a monster did not appeal to him.

Still, monstrosity fascinated him, in all its various forms. His research had for some time led him to investigate seismic anomalies and abnormalities, though more often than not he ended up debunking urban legends. As a hobby, he was fascinated by the geography of horror, and for several years he'd been tracking down a rumor about a town called Night Vale. No one came from Night Vale, and no one went there and returned, or so it was said.

His break finally came one day when he was investigating a house which shook like a dropped bowl of jelly once every four hours, despite not being located on any fault lines or near any highways or railroad tracks. While measuring the walls for structural deformations, Carlos observed that the homeowner's framed diploma was from Night Vale High.

At first, she seemed dismayed that he'd seen it – later, he wondered if it was not meant to be visible. But Carlos smiled at her and touched the back of her hand as he asked his questions, and she told him everything.

Which was fortunate, because when he called back the next day to ask about the water levels in her toilet tanks, no one answered. No one ever did answer that number again; after a few weeks, all he heard was dead air.

But by then Carlos already had a team of graduate students from his alma mater assembled for a summer research project in Night Vale, and he made a point of delivering his grant applications in person, with charming smiles all around. He was _very_ well funded.

Carlos ended up staying after the graduate students left. He kept in touch with them on Facebook, and was relieved they all seemed to believe they'd spent six weeks living in tents in the desert observing normal modes.

Carlos was not sure when he himself would leave Night Vale. He had hoped and expected to become normal, or at least unremarkable, but the distressing enthrallment of the locals was swift and absolute. However, the town was unpredictable in a way that suggested natural rules did not apply, which was new and interesting. Carlos had never been able to experience his own personal perfection, merely make deductions from observation of its effects. He now had the exhilarating yet devastating opportunity to experience a suite of similarly mind-bending lapses in time, space, common sense, and corporeality. He feared Night Vale, and he loved it.

The man who did the evening radio broadcasts had an obsessive crush on Carlos' perfection, and Carlos cringed every time he heard his name through the lab radio's speakers, knowing the next day he'd feel eyes on him, following him, everywhere. But his interest was piqued when, following unexpected late-afternoon enervating terror preceded by a light breeze from the west and temperatures in the low thirties, he heard the announcer – Cecil, Carlos reminded himself, checking the PostIt affixed to the antenna – decry his latest haircut.

Everyone always loved Carlos' hair, no matter how it was cut. As an undergraduate, he'd mostly just hacked at it with scissors whenever it got in his way. When he'd started going gray, he'd tossed out the idea of touching up with dye as being too much work for no payoff, and he'd been right. People started to call his appearance _perfectly dignified_ and speak of his masculine charm. This convinced him to stop shaving, as well.

He wondered – scientifically – how Cecil saw him. It was an interesting diversion, and less likely to lead to unofficial interrogations in the mines than his other areas of inquiry, which brought the Sheriff's secret police around so often that Carlos now stocked the cookies that they liked (Nilla Wafers and Lorna Doones).

He made a point to meet with Cecil professionally, sharing the things he'd learned and asking him to make appeals to the general public. He found, interestingly, that while Cecil's voice was memorable, the man himself made absolutely no impression. A few minutes after each conversation, Carlos discovered he couldn't remember whether Cecil was tall or short, fat or thin, dark or fair.

Carlos told himself firmly that he needed to take notes on Cecil, to jot down important characteristics, to make charts and sketches. But without pens, note-taking was harder to do spontaneously. Other people, he knew, just jabbed their index finger with a pin and scribbled in blood. But most of them probably didn't feel pain.

Carlos wasn't fond of pain.

He was also, he discovered fatefully in the Desert Flower Bowling Alley, Arcade Fun Complex, and Malevolent Subterranean Metropolis, not fond of dying. Exsanguination hurt an awful lot, as did having pieces of his body exploded by miniscule bombs and missiles. For some totally unscientific reason, after he was dragged from the pit all of his injuries transferred to the white man in the feathered headdress, who patted Carlos' hand and murmured _ideal'nyy_ right before he died. Carlos did not believe in magic, but he did believe that the man's death was his fault. Disheveled and battered, he wanted more than anything to see Cecil, if not for absolution, then for some kind of explanation.

Part of him felt that if he truly saw Cecil, he could understand everything.

He tried. He really did. On their third date, when he was still trying to discover what color Cecil's eyes were, he asked Cecil if, perhaps, invisibility ran in his family.

"Ah," Cecil said, and fidgeted. Carlos took his hand and pulled him away from the edge of the waterfront pier. In Night Vale, it was probably possible to drown in the sand, or be attacked by sand sharks. Falling off the sun-bleached boards was probably inadvisable. "No."

"Ah," Carlos repeated. Cecil laced their fingers together and swung their joined hands distractingly. Carlos studied him, the way he did. "For some reason, I don't know what you look like."

Cecil smiled, goofy and sweet, and the knowledge of that smile lingered warmly at the back of Carlos' awareness. "Is that important?" he asked, and gave Carlos the impression of shyness. "Not all of us can be perfect, you know."

"Yes," Carlos said. He dropped Cecil's hand in favor of wrapping his arm around his waist, tugging him close enough that their hips bumped. "If I tell you you're adorable, you'll have to love me. You won't have a choice."

Cecil pressed a significant kiss to Carlos' cheek. "You say the sweetest things."

"I wish I knew if you were monstrous, too," Carlos wanted to say. He wanted to ask Cecil to tell him what perfection meant to him – what he really saw. But that was as impossible as commanding someone to have free will, which Carlos had attempted several times when he was younger, and failed. So instead he rested his head against Cecil's and told him about the wonders of science, and in turn Cecil told him about the beauties of the void, and when the sun finally fled before the swiftly-rising horror of the night sky he took Cecil home and made love to him beautifully and terribly, and felt perfectly alone.


End file.
